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Dear all - please pass this on to any interested colleagues you may have; and feel free to get in touch should you have any questions! All best wishes, Nick and Jo
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Post-democracy
Why does the democratic ideal die, and what comes to replace it?
CFP for a panel at the 2012 AAA annual meetings in San Francisco, November 14-18
Organisers: Dr Joanna Cook (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Dr Nick Long (University of Cambridge)
Concept Statement
During the early years of the twenty-first century, few hopes have been built up so high – and dashed so mercilessly – as those pertaining to ‘democracy’. The promise of emancipatory democratic statehood has inspired uprisings and revolutions across Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Arab World. It has also, notoriously, spawned messianic and sometimes unilateral interventions in the affairs of other nations. Yet by 2012, democracy’s gloss appears to be wearing off. International political commentators wonder whether Mediterranean states are really capable of using democratic governance to overcome the Eurozone crisis – while pundits inside and outside the Middle East worry that post-Arab Spring democracy might prove counterproductive for the region. In both cases, new alternatives to democracy are being envisaged and advocated. As a report for the Trilateral Commission suggested (Putnam & Parr 2000), established forms of democracy in the USA, Western Europe and Japan are becoming paralysed by a fundamental breakdown of trust between politicians and electorates, prompting forms of politics that depart substantially from conventional democratic ideals. Meanwhile, in several regions of newly democratising Indonesia, huge numbers of citizens who had once been active in pro-democracy movements are now turning away embarrassedly from their previous aspirations, and dreaming instead of the arrival of an Islamic caliphate, or a return to the days of authoritarian technocracy.
Such situations have prompted several political theorists to suggest that the twenty-first century is witnessing the emergence of ‘post-democracy’ (e.g. Crouch 2004; Habermas 2011). Taking our cue from this idea, this panel seeks to develop an anthropological approach to ‘post-democratic’ life, thought, and ethics, as they are unfolding around the world. We define ‘the post-democratic’ broadly – as any modality of statecraft, citizenship, political philosophy, or aspiration, that departs substantially from a previously held democratic ideal. Such departures can be abrupt or gradual. They might sometimes entail an outright rejection of ‘democracy’. In other cases they might still use the language of ‘democracy’ but nevertheless represent a fundamental reimagining of what ‘democratic’ politics can or should be.
An anthropological approach has much to offer our understanding of these dynamics, contextualising emergent ‘post-democratic’ thought in the complexities and specificities of particular social actors’ life histories and lifeworlds. To that effect, we invite papers that track the reasons people – from ordinary citizens to opinion formers, commentators, bureaucrats and politicians – turn away from their established horizons of ‘democracy’, and which document the alternative political and social formations and fantasies in which they invest their hopes. We thereby hope that the panel will shed sharp ethnographic insight on the new forms of ideology and political action that are (re)emerging worldwide, and on the local, national, and transnational influences that are shaping new imaginaries of, and ideals for, the political.
Theoretically, the panel addresses the complex question of how and why people might feel compelled to move beyond their previous ideals of ‘democracy’. When and why is hope lost – or relocated? Why might some people feel this represents a ‘boundary crossing’ in their lives – and why might others frame their transition differently? How might the language in which shifts in political aspiration are described have a bearing on how new aspirations are experienced and acted upon? Does this present descriptive challenges for anthropologists? What is it about emergent new political ideals that makes them so appealing? The panel will also address the question of how and why political ideals transform. How might affective resonances of hope and disillusionment in the past articulate to shape emergent political imaginaries in the present? How should we theorise continuities and disjunctions between individuals’ ‘democratic’ and ‘post-democratic’ thought? Are narratives of the life course of democracy being manipulated by specific actors (including scholars) to pursue particular interests or strategies? And if they are, how should we, as anthropologists, best make sense of these people’s claims and their consequences?
Practicalities
Please send a title and abstract of no more than 250 words to Joanna Cook ([log in to unmask]) and Nick Long ([log in to unmask]) by February 29, 2012.
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Dr Nick Long,
Room 1.1, Division of Social Anthropology,
Free School Lane,
Cambridge
CB2 3RF
UK
Office: +44 (0)1223 763963
Fax: +44 (0)1223 335993
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